Not Famous, But Practical

The New York Times, like every newspaper in the city founded before 1900, started downtown. After renting space for its first few years, the paper built the old 41 Park Row in 1858, then reconfigured and expanded that building (to the point where it was effective rebuilt) at the same site and address in 1889. The rebuilt 41 Park Row is still there and is now landmarked, but the Times was only there for a few years. After a few years, the paper was again looking for more space, and ended up at the dramatically narrow triangular block bounded by 42nd Street on the south, Seventh Avenue on the west, and Broadway as the hypotenuse on the east. The resulting tower included new IRT subway tunnels in its subcellars, got Longacre Square renamed Times Square, and presented a profile as dramatic (if not as well designed) as the Flatiron Building. The paper was there from 1905 to 1913. Skipping ahead, since 2007, the Times has been at Eighth Avenue and 41st Street, in a building that is its third architecturally-distinctive skyscraper.

So…what about 1913 to 2007?

The 42nd Street tower was simply too small in floor plan size. There was a decent amount of total area in the building, but the sub-grade printing room was on multiple levels to get some extra space, and there were gross inefficiencies in the endless elevator trips that small footprint required. So the paper built a boring(ish) building a block away, west of Seventh Avenue on 43rd Street, kept near the eponymous square, and for almost a century was not in an architectural showpiece.

I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story other than there are four buildings in Manhattan that are sometimes called “the New York Times Building.”